All posts tagged Health Care

Given the never-ending debate about the Affordable Care Act, you might think that when Americans are asked to name their top health priorities for the president and Congress, they would pick something related to Obamacare, whether it involves expanding the law, scaling it back, or repealing it. But it turns out the American people don’t live in the ACA bubble. Their top priority overwhelmingly, and on a bipartisan basis, was “making sure high cost drugs for chronic conditions were affordable for people who need them.”

The chart above shows the surprising results of the Kaiser Family Foundation’s April Health Tracking Poll. When presented with a long list of options, 76% of Americans chose reducing the cost of drugs for the chronically ill as their top priority. Read More »

Members of the two U.S. political parties are split over which issues are most important for the government to address, with Republicans giving much higher priority to national security issues than do Democrats, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll finds.

Asked which issues should be the federal government’s top priorities, Republican primary voters’ top three issues were national security, the deficit and the issue of job creation and economic growth. Read More »

It’s widely assumed that Americans will become increasingly diligent and informed health-care consumers as higher deductibles and other forms of cost sharing push them to be more prudent purchasers and as they become aware of comparative provider quality and price information. That may well happen–but findings from the Kaiser Family Foundation’s April Health Tracking Poll show that the effort to bring provider quality and cost information to consumers is still in its infancy.

As the chart above shows, very small percentages of Americans say that they saw quality information comparing hospitals (13%) or doctors (10%) over the past 12 months. Of those who saw such data, the shares who said they used it were tiny: 4% for hospitals and 6% for doctors. Only 6% said they saw comparative price information for hospitals or doctors in the past year and only half as many say they used it. Read More »

Tax season has come and gone with no great outbreak of protest about the Affordable Care Act’s least popular provision: the individual mandate.

This central element of the ACA was included to help ensure that the individual insurance market would have balanced pools of healthier people and sicker people to help spread insurance risk and keep premiums reasonable. While most of the individual provisions of the ACA are popular, the mandate has always been decidedly unpopular: It is disliked by 65% of the public, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s December Health Policy Tracking Poll. No one really knew how Americans would react to a requirement that people buy insurance or pay a fine to help create more viable insurance pools. Most Americans don’t spend a lot of time thinking about insurance pooling, and there would be winners and losers as risk was spread. Read More »

For years, hospitals have boosted their list prices for inpatient stays much more quickly than the costs underlying any treatments grew, because there are few checks built into the system, a Wall Street Journal analysis finds. Read More »

No single fact can settle the long-running debate of whether public or private health insurance is preferable. But by one basic metric, the rate of increase in per capita spending, public insurance has an edge.

The Federal Office of the Actuary in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has charted the annual rate of increase in spending for Medicare, Medicaid, and private health insurance. As the chart above shows, by cumulative growth in per capita spending, Medicare and Medicaid have generally grown more slowly than private insurance and are projected to continue doing so through 2023. Read More »

Notes from a 1994 meeting of Clinton administration officials reveal that some of the language and phrases they mulled for selling their universal health care plan were similar to the words the Obama administration employed nearly two decades later. Read More »

Has the effort peaked to sign up uninsured Americans for coverage? The announcement that the nonprofit organization Enroll America is laying off staff and redirecting its focus in the face of funding cuts comes amid inconsistent sign-ups during the second Affordable Care Act open-enrollment period and concerns about affordability.

A recent New York Times analysis compared Kaiser Family Foundation estimates of potential enrollees with sign-up data from the Department of Health and Human Services. Read More »

In my last Think Tank piece, I reported that just 3% of Americans felt health costs had been rising more slowly than usual, even though they have been growing at record low rates in recent years. The chart above shows why that might be the case: The gap is widening between growth in wages and what workers pay for health premiums and deductibles. The gap between deductibles and wages is especially yawning, reflecting the steady growth in deductibles seen in recent years. Since 2006 wages have grown 23% while deductibles for single coverage have risen 108%. Read More »

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Washington Wire is one of the oldest standing features in American journalism. Since the Wire launched on Sept. 20, 1940, the Journal has offered readers an informal look at the capital. Now online, the Wire provides a succession of glimpses at what’s happening behind hot stories and warnings of what to watch for in the days ahead. The Wire is led by Reid J. Epstein, with contributions from the rest of the bureau. Washington Wire now also includes Think Tank, our home for outside analysis from policy and political thinkers.